Breakdown of the year: U.S. Particle Physics.

This article reports that researchers around the globe fear that if U.S. particle physics withers, so will the entire field. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) asked physicists to consider which of two existing particle colliders they would rather shut down early to save money. Physicists got a shock in February, when DOE nixed BTeV, a $140 million experiment that would have run at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Using beams from Fermilab's Tevatron collider, BTeV would have studied bottom quarks, heavier, unstable cousins of the down quarks found in protons and neutrons. BTeV researchers were expecting to get the final go-ahead for construction. Meanwhile, researchers in Europe are assembling the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Scheduled to start up in 2007, the $7.7 billion machine might produce the long-sought Higgs boson, the particle thought to give others their mass. But particle physicists from Europe and Asia aren't celebrating the passing of the torch from the United States.